When her son, Darryl, was younger, she came to rely on them several times a year when he would slip out of the house and go missing.

Sometimes she would find him, but other times the police would have to help, occasionally going as far as sending up a chopper to look for Darryl, who has Down syndrome and at the time was entering his teenage years.

"I don't know what I would have done without them," she said.

But when police recently pulled over the Rev. Kevin Cosby while he was driving his Audi in a West End neighborhood, it renewed fears that she has about her son and what would happen if he ever comes in contact with a police officer under not-so-friendly circumstances.

In the case of Cosby, the president of Simmons College and senior pastor at St. Stephen Church, the officer said he stopped Cosby for an "improper turn," never explaining what was improper about it, and because he had a plastic rim around his license plate, probably not unlike the one you have around yours.

Cosby wasn't ticketed.

Peterson believes that some police officers — not all of them — sometimes stop people just because they're black. She said it's happened to her.

She believes it could happen again. And if he slips out, she worries it could happen to her son.

Darryl Nelson is now 20 years old and he's pretty broad.

“Look at him,” she said recently. “From the back, he looks like a grown man.”

Darryl is a friendly guy. He’s quick to offer a handshake, and he likes to talk, even if a speech impediment makes it difficult to understand him.

Peterson doesn’t let Darryl go out alone, and he's not nearly as prone to slip away as he once was. But that doesn't mean he won't walk away.

And for Peterson, the concern is that an officer might see him walking down the street and try to stop him. The officer, she said, might be looking for someone who fits Darryl’s description or just looking to question him because the officer thinks he looks suspicious.

“I don’t know what he would do,” she said of her son.

“If they told him to stop, he might keep walking toward them," she said. "If they told him to take his hands out of his pockets, he might not understand.”

In fact, in most situations, Peterson said Darryl won't understand the police, and the police won't understand him. What could happen then could have tragic consequences, she worries.

It’s not an irrational fear.

David M. Perry has documented in The Nation magazine numerous cases around the country in which disabled people were arrested, harmed and even killed by police officers who didn’t recognize that they were dealing with someone with a mental disability.

In September 2017, police in Oklahoma City shot and killed a Latino man who was carrying a pipe and wouldn’t obey their verbal commands to lie down. He was deaf.

It’s not just minorities. In 2013, in Frederick, Maryland, off-duty sheriff’s deputies handcuffed and threw to the ground a man who refused to leave a movie theater after the flick ended. The man died of asphyxia. Police didn’t recognize that he, like Darryl, had Down syndrome.

Perry, the writer, has a son, Nico, who has Down syndrome as well.

“I worry that someday a police officer might tell Nico to do something and that he might ignore it. I worry that the officer will reach for a Taser or pepper spray or truncheon. I worry about Nico because I know there is a larger pattern of police violence against people with disabilities,” he once wrote.

Peterson has done what she can to make sure Darryl doesn’t wind up handcuffed or worse. A few years ago, she said she enrolled him in the Louisville Metro Police Department's old Explorer program in hopes that Darryl would come to recognize police uniforms and to listen to officers if they ever gave him an order.

She also would like to see police in Louisville beef up their training so officers can better and more easily recognize when they are dealing with someone with a disability.

In 2016, the city of Louisville settled a lawsuit for $32,000 after a woman said her autistic son was bitten by a police dog and was handcuffed after police entered her home believing there had been a break-in.

Jessie Halladay, a spokeswoman for the Louisville Metro Police, said police recently completed training in how to recognize and deal with people who have autism, and throughout their careers, they get even more training.

In recruit school, they get training on policing those with mental and learning disabilities during a 40-hour crisis-intervention training course, and they also receive 16 more hours in training from different organizations that deal with developmental issues.

And Halladay said additional training is sometimes included in annual in-service training that all police officers receive. Also, people can register with MetroSafe if they have someone in their home with a developmental disorder so police know in advance when they're responding to their address.

Peterson would like to see more training for police officers, in part because she understands how difficult their jobs can be. "It's one thing to protect your family, but to protect a whole community," she said as her voice tailed off.

Until she's satisfied with the police training, she said, Darryl will be "connected to my hip. ... It's the only way I can make sure nothing happens to him."

Joseph Gerth's opinion column runs on most Sundays and at various times throughout the week. He can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/josephg.